Word: leadership
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Camp David clearly improved Carter's standing with Congress and the public. "My reputation as a capable leader was enhanced," he said, quite deadpan, at his press conference. But the spirit of Camp David will not linger indefinitely, and Carter will have to prove his leadership many times over in the battles that lie ahead with Congress...
SEMANTIC ARGUMENTS about leadership are not particularly enlightening. And Burns fails to go beyond them to explain the forces that shape the relation of leaders to followers. Factors such as the distribution of power resources between leaders and followers and their means of interaction--be it through elections, political parties or riots--are not clearly laid out or given relative weights. These complexities emerge in some of his historical discussion, but they are not linked by a common thread of theory...
...discussion of Mao's leadership in the Chinese revolution, he recognizes in a few paragraphs the importance of the Communist party hierarchy as the mediator between the masses and the leaders, but he does not explain why it worked when so many other attempts at leadership have failed...
...unnecessarily dogmatic to require that leadership produce social or institutional change. A leader and his followers may interact with noble intentions and never converge with a propitious historical environment. To exclude American socialist Norman Thomas and his followers from the hallowed halls of leadership because they were unable to achieve what they had hoped to is an unjust rendering of leadership...
After the nightmare of World War II, we need to go beyond making obvious moral judgments of human beings in history. Unfortunately, James MacGregor Burns's book doesn't change the fact that "leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth." The mystery remains...